Word: wagnerism
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...came to Hollywood and cried, 'This is the most beautiful toy in the world.' " So said French Theater Director Patrice Chéreau, 31, as he contemplated the prospect of staging the centennial celebration of the Bayreuth Festival with a new production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, Wagner's longest, densest and most puzzling creation. The results were on display last week at the somber brick Festspielhaus, which Wagner himself designed, and they brought on a storm of booing deep and raw. A few people both booed and clapped at once. Shouting matches broke out between husbands...
Bayreuth has known-and absorbed-protest before, notably in the early '50s when Wagner's grandson Wieland introduced the stark, abstract productions that have remained influential ever since. Wieland's brother and successor, Wolfgang, knows his conservative local constituency very well-he staged an undistinguished Ring cycle of his own in 1971-but for the big five-week-long birthday he went out to hire men who would shake things up the way they must be shaken periodically if an opera house is to command international attention...
...conduct he chose Pierre Boulez, known for his readings of modern works but not particularly for his Wagner. He then approached Berlin's Peter Stein to be director, and the word around Bayreuth is that the irreverent Stein proposed a Ring cycle without music. Wagner's next pick, suggested by Boulez, was Chéreau, the current enfant terrible of the Paris stage, whose only previous ventures into opera were an iconoclastic Tales of Hoffmann in Paris and Rossini's L'ltaliana in Algeri at Spoleto. ("You should watch this young man," said Luchino Visconti, director...
...ready her chorus for other maestros. She founded her group 19 years ago at Fritz Reiner's invitation. Today the Hillis sound-vibrant, precise, enormous-has become an indispensable element of the famed Solti sound, notably at events like Sir Georg's luminous concert version of Wagner's The Flying Dutchman. Says Solti: "Working with her and that chorus is one of the major joys of my life...
...princess had indulged in a sexual encounter in a public lavatory at Paris' Orly Airport, the Sunday Telegraph, which wrongly claimed she was pregnant with Amin's baby, and the Sun, which mistakenly put her name in the caption for a nude photo. Meanwhile, Movie Stars Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood won a suit against Reveille, a British picture magazine that had claimed they were headed for a second divorce. "We are very happily married," asserted Wagner as he and the missus left court. And happily richer, as was the princess. Amounts of the judgments were not disclosed...